ADA Website Compliance
Having an ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant website as a business is important so no potential customers are alienated by being unable to access your website. The goal is to make sure that users with various impairments, such as visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities, can interact with and navigate your site effectively. It takes additional effort to create a website that falls within the guidelines but the pay off is well worth it.
Outside of accessibility being incredibly important, there are four other main reasons we’d recommended getting your website ADA accessible:
Legal compliance and avoiding legal issues: the number of lawsuits against non-compliant sites is growing and they are often winning. Getting ahead of it, coming up to compliance will help you avoid legal woes and penalties.
Makes business sense: address different population's needs, it expands your market reach
It’s good for SEO: Think about alt descriptions on photos, those are done for readers to describe the photo for visually impaired people. These alt text descriptions will boost you in the search algorithm
It improves the user experience for everyone: This is always important for helping people navigate your website!
There are three levels of compliance A, AA and AAA (the highest). We recommend that business websites be at least level AA. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that all websites, public and private, be accessible to people with disabilities. Website owners can choose to follow three general levels of compliance:
ADA Compliance Checklist for Websites:
Level A (minimum) – The most basic web accessibility features.
Level AA (mid-range) – Deals with the biggest and most common barriers for disabled users.
Level AAA (highest) – The highest level of web accessibility.
If the idea of updating your website to meet these standards is stressful, don't worry! In general, we don't recommend trying to address website ADA compliance on your own. There are many steps necessary to begin the process with the first being an ADA audit to determine how compliant (or not) your website is. The audit will categorize the issues found by priorities and high risk vs low risk and also by type of fixes, meaning fixes that require developer resources, vs design resources vs content resources. Most issues will be fixed by addressing it with developers adding features or designers making graphics have higher contrast or things like better descriptions. Hiring a professional is the way to go, it’s their job to know any ADA compliant developments and they’ll be able to do it in the most streamlined and concise way.
While we might not be ADA compliance experts, we are here to help you with any and all of your marketing needs! Schedule your consultation here and let's chat about what we can do to help your business thrive.